“Soft drink machines?”
“They’re usually empty,” Wong said.
“The cafeteria staff is slacking off,” Tiflin said.
I was stubborn. “One by one, we should all look at the building security videos.”
“What the hell would that tell us?” Tiflin asked, standing. Clearly he’d had enough.
“That there’s more than one Dieter walking around Building 10,” I said. “And more than one Tiflin.”
“Christ,” Tiflin said.
“I met Dieter in his office, then I saw him in Room 57,” Mickle said. “He couldn’t have got there ahead of me.”
“Did he look like me totally—same clothes, same hair?” Dieter asked, fascinated.
“Yeah. And then—I think—when you saw him on the video feed, you both vanished.”
“You think?”
“I made a note to that effect on my phone,” Mickle said. “Because I don’t remember.”
“Me, too, with Tiflin,” I said.
“Cool!” Dieter said, looking feverish. “If we could pin this down, make some real experiments, we’d know something tremendous, wouldn’t we?”
Tiflin got out of his chair and went to the door.
I held out my hand to stop him. “My dupe told me to check the Pepsi supply. Most of us drink Pepsi or Mountain Dew.”
“Tra-dition!” Mickle sang, straight out of Fiddler on the Roof.
Tiflin folded his arms.
“Some of us are fresh out of gum,” I said. “Some of us wear the same clothes for days at a time, and dirty sneakers, and wouldn’t notice if we were sharing, would we?”
“Go to hell,” Tiflin said.
“They’re out of Snapple, too,” Mickle said. Oddly, like Dieter, he seemed to be enjoying this, as if it proved something important or at least interesting. Sometimes working with smarter people is infuriating.
“If we did look at the videos, what would that do?” Dieter asked with little-boy wonder. “I mean, none of us have met…them. Us. The others. If they exist.”
“They do not exist,” Tiflin said.
“But has anyone actually seen another?” Dieter asked. “What would happen if we just looked at them?”
“Collapse the wave function,” Wong said. “Stop all this shit right in its tracks. One non-Abelian programmer can’t exist in the same space or time as another, right?”
“They’re no more real than the standing wave,” Tiflin said in a high, exhausted growl. He seemed ready to break into tears. Who could blame him?
“I think we’re way beyond being worried about 8 Ball’s success,” Dieter said. “But we could collapse it all—make all the others vanish, along with their programs. We can pull the plug.”
“That would kill our bonuses,” Mickle said.
“Cashing multiple versions of the same check will crash more than the wave function,” I said.
And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you! That’s what my wife had told me. A female version of me had to have crossed some distance in the multiverse to occupy this world line, didn’t she? She showed up first in China. I go there infrequently. And she figured it all out before I did. She somehow managed to avoid me, but still left me notes to clue me in. Notes apparently don’t flip the state. To everyone else here, I am still male, and she had to act through me if she was to exert any influence in the open—right? Maybe my others, eventually, would come from far enough across the multiverse that I would be the anomaly.
This was bending my brain big-time.
“Why aren’t we seeing hundreds of them? Thousands?” Mickle asked, clearly finding it hard to believe he was even asking the question.
Dieter was our Rottweiler when it came to pure theory. “Our spaces aren’t that big. If more than one dupe meets—however many they are in total—they all vanish!”
“So if they appear in a clump, they cancel out immediately,” Wong said, firmly in the spirit of this gedanken discussion.
“Heisenbergian crowd control,” Mickle said. “Lovely.”
Tiflin was pinking brightly now and couldn’t bring himself to speak. My remark about the gum and the clothes had shaken him. Maybe he was starting to believe.
“Sorry,” Dieter said, smiling as if at a lovely dream. “One last thought. How many 8 Balls are there? Is our machine in a superposition with all the others? And how could that possibly be stable?”
“Shoot me now,” Tiflin said, pushing past my arm toward the door.
These dupes, as Mickle calls them, are us, smart or smarter. They find themselves in roughly the same environments, covering the same or very similar world lines, attending the same meetings—if they’re not yet clued in about such things—but never more than one per meeting, one per world line. The only way to survive is to avoid meeting yourself. Both will vanish. And their programs or parts of programs, in 8 Ball, might also vanish—which could help explain some weird irregularities in the output. The better programmers you or your dupe are, the more your vanishing affects the success of the standing wave.
I have employees not on our team going over the tapes, tracking us or versions of us on the security system, letting us know where 8 Ball programmers are congregating. Word is getting out. This is spooking everybody.
Why aren’t there trillions of us, filling the Earth to capacity? First of all, there’s that problem of encounters. Second, there’s the probability that for every alternate world in the multiverse, we’re sharing dupes. One vanishes from one world and appears in another. Dupes are traded—filling in a hole, like a tunneling electron—but are not actually duplicated.
And perhaps not even actually destroyed. Who can say?
Who could ever know?
And for every alternate Earth, there is an 8 Ball, very little different from the one we made, going through the same processes, running the same Gödelian strings, with the same successful discovery of extraordinarily long primes, the same confirmation of the Enormous Theorem, the same ability to solve problems involving insane levels of number-crunching. If we could coordinate or discover or recover all those programs, running on all those 8 Balls (or their successors), we’d probably have at least a short list of every possible mathematical problem, run to exhaustion or even solved.
That success will generate more funding for more machines like 8 Ball—bigger machines, newer machines, better and better machines. And all the worlds of the multiverse will begin to fill with people like us at an even faster rate; a surfeit of smart people, clever people, people smarter than me, until perhaps the flash point is reached—more brilliant programmers than any Earth actually needs. Would the multiverse start weeding out these upstarts?
I don’t want to look at any more security tapes. I don’t want to go home and find my female self in the arms of my wife. And I don’t want to run into myself in Building 10 and pop out of existence.
I’ve packed a bag, taken a large sum out of my bank, kissed my wife, left a note for my “sister,” gassed up my VW, and pretty soon I’ll drive to a town I’ve never been to before, someplace I wouldn’t think of. If of course I can think of such a place.
How many of me will think the same? Where would I never want to live? What if we all flee to the same safe, awful hellhole? And is it worth my survival to live there? Between me and my dupes, there’s only one white VW Rabbit, and I seem to have the only set of keys. Dupes bring along their clothes but not their cars. Maybe her keys don’t fit. Maybe she drives a Volvo. Smarter, right?
Again, this bends my brain. I’m trying to imagine the mass exodus. We’ll empty the United States in our Teslas and Mercedeses and then rental cars and motorbikes and maybe bicycles and then just walking or running. A flood of the world’s finest programmers spreading out from North America. Biblical!